Misc

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 4.7-rc4 kernel on Sunday night.

Linus explained in the announcement, "It's been a fairly normal week, and rc4 is out. Go test. The statistics look very normal: about two thirds drivers, with the rest being half architecture updates and half 'misc' (small filesystem updates,. some documentation, and a smattering of patches elsewhere). The bulk of the driver updates are usb and gpu, but there's iio, leds, platform drivers, dma etc)."

Simon Coter, Principal Product Manager Oracle VM and VirtualBox, has announced the release of the third Beta build of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1 open-source and cross-platform virtualization software.

VirtualBox 5.1 promises to be a major release that will introduce a significant number of new features and improvements, among which we can mention a revamped installer based on the latest Qt5 technologies, and the ability to rebuild kernel modules without the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) framework.

Netdata is a real-time resource monitoring tool with a friendly web front-end developed and maintained by FireHOL. With this tool, you can read charts representing resource utilization of things like CPUs, RAM, disks, network, Apache, Postfix and more. It is similar to other monitoring software like Nagios; however, Netdata is only for real-time monitoring via a web interface.

The Qt Company has released a new version of its namesake C++ cross-platform app dev tool, featuring new licensing that consolidates the open source and commercial versions of its Qt for Application Development offering.

This past week the GTK+ road-map was updated during the GTK hackfest with more plans for the future, on top of their new vision for GTK+ 4.0 and beyond.

The work that remains on the GTK roadmap for the GNOME 3.22 release this fall includes the (already completed) Wayland graphics tablet support along with plans for an image viewing widget, merging GSK, an image viewing widget, moving menu placement to GDK for Mir/Wayland, cleaning up display/screen/monitor code, GtkPathBar improvements, and more.

Softpedia has been informed today, June 20, 2016, by Solus Project's Ikey Doherty, about the release and immediate availability for download of the Solus 1.2 "Shannon" operating system.

We've talked a lot lately about Solus 1.2 and the fact that it is coming soon. Well, today is that day, the day when you can finally enjoy all the goodies that the great Ikey Doherty and the skillful team of developers behind the Solus Project have prepared for you during the past three months, since the release of Solus 1.1.

Zenwalk developer Jean-Philippe Guillemin has informed users of the Slackware-based operating system that the final Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Zenwalk 8.0 release is now available for public testing.

The TRS-80 Model II support in Kermit is missing hardware flow control support however which means that it’s very prone to dropping characters. I started to look into what it might take to add hardware flow control and this sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out how the TRS-80 hardware works, how the Z80 SIO works, learning Z80 assembly, and of course, how the heck you even build CP/M Kermit 4.11 from source.

Last summer, I wrote an article series called "Kicking Google out of my life." It was an attempt to remove all Google services entirely from my daily usage for 30 days—a surprisingly daunting challenge for someone who had become deeply dependent on Google. I was mostly successful. I chronicled my experience—detailing how I approached replacing Google services with non-Google variants—and in the end, my life was better for it.

Deutsche Bank has moved its blockchain project out of the proof of concept stage, according to the bank’s head of disruptive technologies, who also warned that the distributed ledger blockchain technology is still five to ten years from widespread use.

The idea is to undermine the monopolies of companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and the like with a genuinely cooperative, horizontal and P2P model directly controlled by the users themselves, and cut out the corporate middleman altogether. Advocates for this model have coined the term “Platform Cooperativism” for it (if you search the #PlatformCooperativism hashtag on Twitter, you’ll find links to a lot of great articles on it).

This is not related to KDE itself, but I’d like to hear some opinion from keyboard layout users, especially from those who use more than one keyboard layout.

Right now I’m designing a new feature for fcitx (for people who doesn’t know it, it’s an input method framework under Linux), currently called “input method group”. The goal of this feature is to solve the conflict between keyboard layout and input method (mostly conceptually) . It can also solve some other problem, but the original goal is about keyboard layout.

he 8-year-old worm continues to infect in some corners of the Internet, highlighting the difficulty in eradicating more virulent programs.
On Oct. 23, 2008, Microsoft revealed a critical flaw that could allow an attacker to remotely compromise and infect Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 systems.

It took only a week for the Internet's seedier element to create the first malware based on the vulnerability. While initial attacks targeted specific companies and infected fewer than a dozen systems a day, the situation was much worse a month later when an unknown malware developer released a self-propagating worm.

When you are considering a switch to a computer with Linux pre-installed, you may be surprised to discover that the hardware is about the same price as a comparable Windows machine. You may have heard of something called the "Microsoft Tax" which refers to the extra price you pay for the cost of Windows on a computer that you buy with the intention of installing Linux on it. As a result, you may think that you should pay less for an equivalent computer with Linux pre-installed. After all, Linux is free and Windows sells for hundreds of dollars. But you don't. That's because the so-called Microsoft Tax doesn't really exist. It's a myth.

Container technology is rapidly transforming the way enterprises develop and deliver applications, and adoption is set to ramp up spectacularly in the next year, even as obstacles towards adoption persist.

As you may know, I've been remixing Fedora for several years for my own personal use... called MontanaLinux. I've also been remixing CentOS and Scientific Linux and thought I'd write a little bit about it.

The main reason I created the EL7 remixes is because I have a few older HP Proliant servers at work that have the CCISS Raid Controller and Red Hat dropped support for those in RHEL 7. Also, I originally included both GNOME and KDE as part of it but have since decided to make it leaner by switching to XFCE 4.12 that is available in EPEL... and of course it includes all of the available updates as of build time.

Robolinux is a unique Linux distribution that comes with a stealth VM for deep Windows integration. The latest release of this operating system i.e. Robolinux 8.5 LTS “Raptor” is now available for download. This release–featuring Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, and LXDE versions–comes with Steam for Linux client for seamless gaming.

It has been a very busy week, but it has shown how much enthusiasm every contributor puts into Tumbleweed. There have been again 4 snapshots released (0609, 0611, 0612 and 0613) and this marks the end of ‘Tumbleweed being built using GCC 5’. As usual, one end is just the beginning of something new: starting with Snapshot 0614 (or any higher number, in case openQA won’t agree) the entire distribution is built using GCC 6 as compiler.

Ubuntu’s Touch OS powered smartphone have slowly started becoming a reality since the last few years. Meizu MX4 was one of the powerful Ubuntu powered phones launched till date. That aside there are a few other devices that support Ubuntu Touch OS thanks to ports like these. Canonical’s Ubuntu OS however has succeeded to get a head start in the smartphone mainly due to the lack of features over an Android or iOS device.

elementary OS is a very popular and one of the most beautiful Linux distros out there. The upcoming version of the OS i.e. elementary OS 0.4 ‘Loki’, is coming in next few months. The first beta of this open source operating system is already here and you can download it right now to get started with testing.

Last week, I tried to get a subscription to Microsoft Office. I expected to simply find an Office license that included what I needed for a simple price. Instead, I discovered that Microsoft’s Office licenses are infuriatingly complex, making it nearly impossible for anyone to get what they need without overspending.

IF Microsoft has its way, the vast membership of LinkedIn, the business networking site with more than 433 million members, will be instantly available to you while you use Microsoft products like Outlook or Skype. How many of LinkedIn’s members do you want to consult while also using Excel or typing away in Word? Microsoft is betting it’s a lot; this is part of its rationale for its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, announced on Monday.

The companies’ chief executives, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, explained their reasons for the deal in a PowerPoint presentation distributed to investors. In the center of a graphic titled, “A professional’s profile everywhere,” was a picture of an anonymous LinkedIn “professional” with arrows pointed outward to seven Microsoft products.

We’ve reported earlier on the release of the GParted 0.26.1 open-source partition editor, as well the GParted Live 0.26.1-1 distrolette that lets you use the latest GParted release on any personal computer.

The first, very-alpha release of reprotest is now out at PyPi. It should hit Debian experimental later this week. While it only builds on an existing system (as I'm still working on support for virtualization), it can now check its own reproducibility, which it does in its own tests, both using setuptools and debuild. Unfortunately, setuptools seems to generate file-order-dependent binaries, meaning python setup.py bdist creates unreproducible binaries. With debuild, reprotest probably would be reproducible with the modified packages from the Reproducible Builds project, though I haven't tested that yet. It tests 'captures_environment', 'fileordering' (renamed from 'filesystem'), 'home', 'kernel', 'locales', 'path', 'time', 'timezone', and 'umask'. The other variations require superuser privileges and modifications that would be unsafe to make to a running system, so they will only be enabled in the containers.

Microsoft had a bold vision for its Xbox One console that involved its Kinect accessory. While the Kinect for Xbox 360 was one of the most popular game console accessories of all time, a bundled Kinect with the Xbox One introduced a $100 price premium over the PS4 competition. Despite switching course and unbundling the Kinect, Microsoft hasn't recovered yet in the games console battle, with reports suggesting it has sold 20 million Xbox One consoles vs. Sony's 40 million PS4 shipments.

Even for Linux, you have to consider the platform. In my case, I’m using a 64-bit Intel/AMD PC. But you might be using a 32-bit version or running on ARM (or any other CPU Linux supports). There is even a 32-bit interface for 64-bit Linux (x32), if you are interested in that. The second order of business, then, is to figure out what the CPU architecture looks like.

KDE is a free software community full of diversity and, as such, we foster several meetings and welcome people from all over the world. The 4th Latin-America KDE Summit (LaKademy 2016) took place from 26-29 May at Federal University of State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Brazil. Since 2014, LaKademy has become a yearly meeting (it happened every two years since 2010) and that has proven to be a quite important step to create a "sprint culture", narrow the ties with the global community, and better support newcomers. In every new edition, old LaKademy participants are more experienced about how sprints work and, therefore, more skillful in the task of guiding newcomers through their way into the Free Software world.

GParted developer Curtis Gedak has announced the availability of the first point release for the GParted 0.26 open-source partition editor utility announced back in April 2016.

Launched on April 26, GParted 0.26.0 introduced some exciting new features and improvements, among which we can mention read-only support for encrypted filesystems with the LUKS method, as well as the implementation of a progress bar for file system copy methods supporting EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, and NTFS.

The implications of such a bounty are being considered including staffing requirements for bug triage and validation, and the need to find a way to force developers to develop and apply patches for affected software.

It’s really common for pitches to managements within companies about Linux kernel upstreaming to focus on cost savings to vendors from getting their code into the kernel, especially in the embedded space. These benefits are definitely real, especially for vendors trying to address the general market or extend the lifetime of their devices, but they are only part of the story. The other big thing that happens as a result of engaging upstream is that this is a big part of how other upstream developers become aware of what sorts of hardware and use cases there are out there.

Braille displays come in various sizes. There are models tailored for desktop use (with 60 cells or more), models tailored for portable use with a laptop (usually with 40 cells), and, nowadays, there are even models tailored for on-the-go use with a smartphone or similar (with something like 14 or 18 cells).

The cloud wars rage on. The room is full of 800lb gorillas that have been battling over market share and supremacy for several years now. You know who the key players are—Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM—all still standing. Three years ago, Gartner described the market as ‘still evolving and maturing’. However, last year, they described the market as ‘in a state of upheaval’ with many providers shifting their strategies as they struggle to obtain market share.

Week 2016/23 will go into the history books as the week a Tumbleweed snapshot sneaked through all openQA tests, hiding a breakage most users experienced. I’d like to apologize for the troubles you had with the 20160605 snapshot. I will explain at the end of the post how this could happen and how we plan on preventing such issues in the future.

I finished my first week on the Fedora Engineering team and it was wonderful. My first week happened to correspond with the FAD Cloud WG 2016 meeting in Raleigh, so I had a chance to meet a lot of Fedora people and spend late nights learning useful bash hacks.

In this post I’m reviewing what I’ve done the last 6 days of Outreachy-funded reproducible builds work, outline what I plan to do the next two weeks, and speculate on long term goals. For those of you involved in the Debian reproducible builds project, please provide feedback about future plans and work!

A few weeks ago I ran into a blog post, sharing the good news: BMW is complying with the GPL. The blog post recounts how BMW shared the sources of the applications they use with the author of the blog on a DVD disk. Luckily, the author uploaded the content of the DVD to GitHub. Browsing the directories, I have found that syslog-ng is also included among the open source applications. It is version 3.4, so it is quite old, but still almost a decade newer than the version included on the Kindle (version 1.6).

An IoT system will typically be made of many devices – from dozens to millions – talking to a scaleable Back-end system. This Back-end system often runs in the Cloud. In some cases the IoT devices will talk directly to the Back-end systems. In other cases an additional system called an IoT Gateway will be placed between the devices and the Back-end systems. The IoT Gateway will typically talk to multiple local IoT devices, perform communications protocol conversions, perform local processing, and connect to the Back-end systems over a Ethernet, WiFi, or cellular modem link.

PC SALES are declining faster than first thought and Microsoft's controversial Windows 10 free upgrade programme is to blame.

That's according to forecasts by analyst outfit IDC, which claims that PC shipments will fall by 7.3 per cent year on year, around with growth in the market now forecast at two per cent below its earlier predictions for 2016.

PC sales fell by as much as 10 percent in 2015 compared with 2014 as vendors such as HP, Dell, Lenovo and Acer saw shipments decline, according to similar data from analyst houses IDC and Gartner.

In particular, the launch of Windows 10 did not provide the boost to sales that had been hoped, in part because the free upgrade offered to Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 device owners meant that many did not need to buy a new machine.

Gartner estimated that worldwide PC shipments in 2015 totalled 288 million, an eight percent decline on the 313 million shipped in 2014.

I asked her whether she had accidentally clicked “OK” on any upgrade notifications, ignored any warnings that she had received or gotten any other notices about the upgrade. No on all counts, she answered before leaving to wrestle with her new operating system.

I admit to having been skeptical. Would Microsoft really take over someone’s computer without warning and install a significant chunk of software without explicit permission? That’s what malware does, I thought, not software from one of the biggest tech firms on the planet with the largest operating system installed base on desktop and laptops PCs.

Turns out, she was right. And I wasn’t the only tech writer whose spouse had this experience: The same thing happened to the wife of PC World’s Brad Chacos.

All this made me wonder: If software from any other company behaved the way the Windows 10 upgrade does, would it be considered malware?

Tails is a Linux distribution most famously used by Edward Snowden. Boot Tails from a live DVD, USB drive, or SD card and it will turn any PC into a more private and anonymous system. Tails forces all network activity to go through the Tor network, preserving anonymity and bypassing Internet censorship. Shut down your computer and the memory will be wiped, with no trace of the Tails activity left on the system.

This important Linux distribution has been advancing steadily with release after release since I last covered it with the release of Tails 1.4. The project just released Tails 2.4 on June 7, 2016.

Designed for a small footprint, the L4Re hypervisor, which is maintained by Kernkonzept, can run on the hardware virtualization technology in MIPS CPUs. The aim of this is to provide more efficient context switching and to make better use of CPU cycles.

Initial patches were published this week for adding initial NVMe-over-Fabrics support for the Linux kernel as set out by the NVMe 1.2b specification. This target implementation is the basics of making this new specification a reality and one of the first public implementations.

In the next few days, Firefox 48 Beta becomes available. If all goes well in our beta testing, we’re about 6 weeks away from shipping the first phase of E10S to Firefox release users with the launch of Firefox 48 on August 2nd.

E10S is short for “Electrolysis”. Similar to how chemists can use the technique called electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we’re using project Electrolysis to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process. Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too.

Plasma 5.7 will ship with a new taskmanager library. One of the reasons to implement a new taskmanager library is the port to Wayland. Our old code base was heavily relying on X11 and didn’t support the concept of multiple windowing systems. You can read more on that in Eike’s blog post about the new task manager. In this blog post I want to focus a little bit on the Wayland side of a task manager.

The long-anticipated Manjaro Linux 16.06 ‘Daniella’ is now available for download. This release has arrived with the latest Linux kernel 4.4 (and 10 other kernel options) and other new features. The flagship Xfce edition of community driven Manjaro Linux comes with Xfce 4.12, bringing more polished desktop experience.

Regardless of why (and there a number of valid reasons), you might like to avoid using such a large project without so much as a specification or standard behind it. Fortunately there are still a number of options out there if you don’t want a systemdOS clone. I’ll present three options ranging from could do better to plausible and then finally the best in class.

If you want software that works for you rather than you being a slave to its supplier, use Free/Libre Open Source Software like Debian GNU/Linux. It saved me many times from re-re-reboots, malware and slowing down.

When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.

The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link.

European Parliament members (MEPs) voted to take a hands-off approach to regulating blockchain technology, Ars Technica reports. Following the vote, unnamed sources told Ars Technica that European Commission staffers are working hard to understand the distributed ledger technology behind virtual currencies ‒ seven years after the launch of Bitcoin, with venture capital investments now totalling more than €1 billion.

In some project there's an awesome process to handle newcomer's contributions - autobuilder picks up your pull and runs full CI on it, coding style checkers automatically do basic review, and the functional review load is also at least all assigned with tooling too.

Then there's project where utter chaos and ad-hoc process reign, like the Linux kernel or the X.org community, and it's much harder for new folks to get their foot into the door. Of course there's documentation trying to bridge that gap, tools like get_maintainers.pl to figure out whom to ping, but that's kinda the details. In the end you need someone from the inside to care about what you're doing and guide you through the maze the first few times.

On Windows, we really only have one graphics driver per GPU. On Linux, however, there is a choice between open drivers and closed, binary-only blobs. Open drivers allow users to perpetuate support, for either really old hardware or pre-release software, without needing the GPU vendor to step in. It can also be better for security, because open-source software can be audited, which is better (albeit how much better is up for debate) than just having a few eyes on it... if any at all.

There are plenty of icon themes available for Linux desktops but we always welcome new eyecandy study stuff which wants to make Linux desktop elegant and different. Revival icon set is a remastered version of an old icon theme which I don't know because it is not mentioned on source page. The icons in this set are kind of gradient variation and mimetypes taken from Emerald icon theme, it come with in three different folder colors: Blue, Orange, and Mint green folders. It is compatible with most of the desktops such as Unity, Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon, KDE and others. It is in active development, so if you want to contribute in any way you can do it via this page.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.